The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.
I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
The first half of life is learning to be an adult-the second half is learning to be a child.
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.
Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird?
Everything you can imagine is real.
Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.
Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
Without great solitude no serious work is possible.
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.
For me, there are two kinds of women – goddesses and doormats.
A plagiarist steals from one person. A true artist steals from everybody.
Go and do the things you can’t. That is how you get to do them.
What might be taken for a precocious genius is the genius of childhood. When the child grows up, it disappears without a trace. It may happen that this boy will become a real painter some day, or even a great painter. But then he will have to begin everything again, from zero.
Let them understand above all that the artist works from necessity; that he, too, is a minute element of the world to whom one should ascribe no more importance than so many things in nature which charm us but which we do not explain to ourselves.
The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.
I have never made radically different experiments. Whenever I wanted to say something, I said it the way I believed I should.
If you are trying to find something, it means you haven’t got it. And if you find it simply by looking for it, that means it’s false.
A good picture, any picture, has to be bristling with razor blades.
When you’re really young, you’re young for life.
Art is the best possible introduction to the culture of the world. I love it for the buried hopes, the garnered memories, the tender feelings it can summon at a touch. It washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
Enough of Art. It’s Art that kills us. People no longer want to do painting: they make art.
Age only matters when one is aging. Now that I have arrived at a great age, I might as well be twenty.
I hate it when people pilfer my things.
In the end there is only Matisse.
